Random House, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster and advocacy group the Green Press Initiative help lead the industry’s ‘green’ transformation.M/b>

By James Sturdivant

‘Green to Gold’

Andrew Winston is co-author of the best-selling book “Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value and Build Competitive Advantage.” In addition to running a consulting firm that works with leading companies, he serves as director of the Corporate Environmental Strategy Project at Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a Fellow of the Center for Environment and Business at Yale. Book Business spoke with Winston about how changes in today’s corporate environmental consciousness are impacting business practices.

What has happened in the past few years to make “greening” one’s corporation a key imperative?
Winston: … A “green wave” is moving through the business community … in two parts. First, changes in the natural world—real resource constraints like water shortages and climate change. Second, rising pressure from stakeholders, but not just nonprofits or protestors. It’s now a dizzying array of people … including a company’s own employees, their customers and even the banks financing them. … The core reason it’s an imperative is that “green” business is better business—companies are slashing costs, driving new revenues, reducing risk and enhancing brand value. Companies must compete on these dimensions or fall behind.

How might these factors impact book publishers?
Winston: All of these pressures are forcing much more awareness of environmental impact up and down the “value chain.” … Publishers rely on a very resource-intensive process in paper. The energy in actual printing may be moderate, but upstream in the value chain, the impact is enormous. More stakeholders are shedding light on these connections.

What specific advice do you have for industries, like publishing, with complex supply chain structures?
Winston: The “greening” of the supply chain is one of the strongest forces in the “green wave.” Many consumer-facing businesses are pushing back, and the ripples are moving fast. Wal-Mart is asking suppliers to reduce packaging and fossil fuel use. In reaction, some big consumer-product companies are asking their suppliers similar questions. … Most industries are going to need to collect more information from their supply chain … just so they can answer their customers. … One hurdle smaller companies face is the lack of leverage on their supply chain. In that case, they often need to band together with others in the industry to set standards.

According to one of the better-known accounts in the compendium of humankind’s greatest achievements, it was in the year 105 that a Chinese man named Ts’ai Lun invented paper, mashing up wood from a mulberry tree with fiber from bamboo. Thus was born a technology that would literally change the world, making possible artistic, scientific and religious revolutions, democratizing literacy and learning, and ushering humanity into the modern age.

In recent times, paper production has played a role in changing the world in other ways. The book industry alone required 3 million to 4 million tons of paper over just the last three years, which translates into the consumption of a lot of trees—at least 60 million worldwide, according to the nonprofit Green Press Initiative (GPI), including wood harvested in some of Earth’s most sensitive ecosystems, the Canadian boreal forest and the Indonesian rain forest among them.

And then there’s the proliferation of greenhouse gases. According to ice core data (which is data derived from a core sample of the accumulation of snow and ice over many years) compiled by the Environmental Protection Agency, in Ts’ai Lun’s day, the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere was at around 280 parts per million, close to where it had been for millennia and where it would remain for approximately the next 1,700 years. Since the 1800s, the industrial revolution has fueled a spike in atmospheric CO2 levels without precedent in the last 650,000 years.

With the GPI reporting that the paper industry emits the fourth-highest level of C02 among manufacturers, these are not numbers the book industry can ignore, as there is widespread evidence of a correlation between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and global temperatures. Deforestation from all causes is estimated to account for 25 percent of human-generated carbon emissions. Another concern is methane, produced by paper as it breaks down in landfills, which, the GPI says, has 23 times the heat-trapping power of carbon.

Measuring the Book Industry’s Environmental Impact

On March 10, the Green Press Initiative (GPI) and Book Industry Study Group (BISG) will release the results of their major benchmarking survey during the Publishing Business Conference and Expo at the Marriott Marquis in New York City. This landmark survey will establish a baseline for tracking climate impacts and improvements by the U.S. book industry.

Get Advice on Going ‘Green’
On March 11, Tyson Miller from GPI and Andrew Van der Laan from Random House will join a panel of other experts presenting the session “How to Improve Your Environmental Impact Without Breaking the Bank” at the Publishing Business Conference and Expo. They’ll explore the options that exist today to help you improve your company’s environmental impact, and discuss what you need to know to go “green”—from today’s manufacturing options to tips for creating and implementing effective corporate policies, and more.

Visit www.PublishingBusiness.com for more information or to register.

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